I’ll be honest, my expectations for this movie weren’t high. I suppose that means it shouldn’t have had a hard time impressing me, but even still it failed. I saw the trailer a few times and had written it off as lame and derivative. Once I was informed that it was directed by Tarsem Singh, I decided to give it a chance. Perhaps it was better than the trailers made it seem. After all, trailers are often times misleading, one way or the other. I LOVED Tarsem’s previous masterpiece, The Fall (here’s the trailer). Then again, I didn’t care too much for his film before that, The Cell. While The Cell looked fantastic, it was otherwise disappointing. I figured this movie could be the tie-breaker. It most certainly broke the tie, but not how I’d hoped.

Writing: I think the key to the success of a movie directed by Tarsem is that it is also written by him. Granted, he doesn’t consider himself a writer, and brought on a couple other writers to polish up The Fall, but the key difference between The Fall and his other two films, The Cell and Immortals, is that he wasn’t a writer on the latter two. There’s little doubt that he’s one of the most gifted visual directors in the game, but as they say, “if it ain’t on the page…”. The “story” for this film is almost unbelievably cliche. All of the Greek gods material is so superfluous to anything it seems not just out of place but a major hindrance to the narrative. It just gets in the way of whatever lame story there already is. Stalwart, unlikely hero? Check. Merciless, violent antagonist? Check. Big, climactic, noisy battle with little logistical merit? Check. Utterly lame “rally the troops” speech before said battle? Check. I’ll say one thing for sure – I’m done with Greek mythology movies. The only halfway decent ancient Greek movies in recent years have been the ones that didn’t have the mythology part (Troy, Alexander).

Production: This is the category where I’m not gonna heavily criticize.  While there may be a bit of a geographical, logistical murkiness to the events of the film, it certainly looks rather nice. The sound mix left a bit to be desired. Costumes were quite good (not as good as in The Fall, but good). It’s not perfect, but Tarsem’s keen visual eye is at least trying as hard as it can to make the dull, unending material at least seem somehow interesting. While the trailer did a poor job with the material, I imagine somebody could cut together a pretty good music video from the footage in the movie. Heck, maybe someday I’ll take a shot at that as an experiment, if somebody doesn’t beat me to it. Oh, and like most movies, I didn’t think the 3D added anything to the film. Actually, it might be yet another one that I prefer the look of in 2D. There are a handful of movies where I’ve liked the 3D, but often times I think they’re better without. I’ve got no idea if this one was filmed for 3D or was a conversion job. If it was converted, at least it was FAR better than one of its Greek mythology predecessors, Clash Of The Titans (but then again, B-movies from the 50s had better 3D than that craptastic conversion).

Cast: While adding Mickey Rourke to a movie is more times than not a good thing, it hurt this film. Sure, he carries the physical aspects of the one-note bad guy perfectly fine, but he chomps on his dialog to such a degree that I had trouble understanding a good chunk of what he was saying. It’s as if they’d filled his mouth with marbles before each take. The male lead, whatever his name is (don’t feel like switching tabs to look it up at the moment), didn’t hurt the movie, but didn’t help it much, either. He plays the whole noble warrior role rather stiff, which I suppose is somewhat appropriate for how it was written. Freida Pinto looks nice in the film, of course, but does little to add much to it. The one saving grace in the cast is John Hurt being, well, John Hurt. He doesn’t get much screen time, but when he does he’s a welcome bit of fresh air.

Music: OK, so maybe I won’t complain much in this category either. To be honest, I don’t remember liking or hating the score. I guess it worked well enough for the material. My only familiarity with composer Trevor Morris previously was from a couple TV shows (Moonlight, The Chase, etc). I might have to track down a copy of the score and give it a listen, see how it works outside the film. I’ll reserve judgment on it until then.

Put simply, while I was watching this movie I was just looking forward to when it would end. Here’s hoping that Tarsem’s next film, “Mirror, Mirror“, is a whole lot better than this one. It should be interesting to see his approach to Snow White. I figure it won’t be as good as The Fall, but surely it’s gotta be better than The Cell and Immortals.